Oklahoma baseball: Sooners earn No. 9 overall seed in 2024 NCAA Tournament
By Chip Rouse
The Oklahoma baseball team will host one of the 16 NCAA Regional locations beginning this week as the No. 9 overall seed in the 2024 NCAA Baseball Championship.
The Sooners, champions of the Big 12 regular-season for the first and last time as a member of that conference for the past 28 seasons, were hoping for a top-eight national seed. That would have given them the opportunity to stay at home through the super regionals the following week. OU missed that cutline by just one spot, but was still rewarded with a top-10 national seed in recognition for the best conference season since 1995.
Top-seeded Oklahoma (37-19) will play a familiar foe in No. 4 Oral Roberts (27-30-1) in its opening regional contest in the Norman Regional on Friday night at L. Dale Mitchell Park. The other two teams taking part in the Norman Regional are Duke (39-18) and UConn (32-23), seeded No. 2 and No.3, respectively.
The Big 12 regular-season champs faced the Golden Eagles of ORU twice during the 2024 season and split the two games. The Sooners won 10-0 in late March in Norman, but lost 3-1 in a rematch a month later in Tulsa. OU owns a 42-36 record over Oral Roberts in the all-time series and is 7-3 against the Golden Eagles in games played in Norman.
Oklahoma and Connecticut have played just twice in baseball and are 1-1 against each other. The Sooners and Duke have never played each other in baseball. As an interesting sidelight, Duke is Oklahoma's opening round opponent in the Women's College World Series, which opens on Thursday this week up the road in Oklahoma City.
This is Oklahoma's 41st appearance in the NCAA Tournament. The Sooners have won seven regional championships, the last being in 2022 in the Gainesville Regional, the same season the Crimson and Cream were national runners-up to Ole Miss in the College World Series.
Oklahoma has victories this season over four ranked teams, including Tennessee, the No. 1 overall seed in this year's NCAA Tournament. The Sooners enter the tournament with the No. 10 strength of schedule in the country and the No. 14 RPI.